Threat to Europe ?

For Europe, There’s a New Threat in Town: The U.S.

New York Times

feb 2, 2017

LONDON — The European Union is accustomed to crises. But it is probably safe to say that none of the 28 leaders who are gathering in Malta on Friday expected the crisis that has overtaken the agenda: the United States of America.

Like much of the world, the European Union is struggling to decipher a President Trump who seems every day to be picking a new fight with a new nation, whether friend or foe. Hopes among European leaders that Mr. Trump’s bombastic tone as a candidate would somehow smooth into a more temperate one as commander in chief are dissipating, replaced by a mounting sense of anxiety and puzzlement over how to proceed.

If many foreign leaders expected a Trump administration to push to renegotiate trade deals, or take a tough line on immigration, few anticipated that he would become an equal opportunity offender. He has insulted or humiliated Mexico, Britain, Germany and Iraq; engaged in a war of words with China and Iran; and turned a routine phone call with the prime minister of Australia, a staunch ally, into a minor diplomatic crisis.

With the possible exception of NATO, where he has softened his tone, Mr. Trump has expressed disdain for other multilateral institutions such as the European Union. His praise has been reserved for populists and strongmen, like Nigel Farage, the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and, of course, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Trump is convinced that the United States has been played for a patsy by the rest of the world and is vowing to set things straight. “We’re taken advantage of by every nation in the world virtually,” he said on Thursday at a prayer breakfast. “It’s not going to happen anymore.”

Against this forbidding backdrop, some European leaders are urging their counterparts to recognize that Mr. Trump may represent a truly dire challenge, one that threatens to upend not only the 70-year European project of integration and security, but just about everything they stand for, including liberal democracy itself.

A European official, Donald Tusk, created a stir this week when he wrote a letter to 27 leaders of the bloc’s 28 member states suggesting that the Trump administration presented a threat on a par with a newly assertive China, an aggressive Russia and “wars, terror and anarchy in the Middle East and Africa.”

Intentionally, he left out Britain, because it has voted to leave the bloc and its prime minister, Theresa May, has rushed with what some Europeans consider unseemly rapidity to the side of Mr. Trump, who has derided the European Union and praised Britain’s withdrawal, or “Brexit,” saying, “I don’t think it matters much for the United States.”

In his letter, Mr. Tusk, a former Polish prime minister who is the president of the European Council, made up of the national leaders, wrote of “worrying declarations” from the Trump team, adding: “Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation, with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy.”

Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian ambassador working in Brussels, said that Mr. Tusk “is prone to exaggeration” and that he had a specific Polish fear of Mr. Trump’s apparent coziness with Mr. Putin.

But Mr. Tusk “has some justification,” Mr. Stefanini said, because he is also reacting to a complacent Brussels establishment “that he believes is shrugging off Brexit, Trump and right-wing populism and believes it’s business as usual.”

Others say Mr. Tusk is adapting realistically to a series of new dangers posed by the new administration in Washington. Mr. Trump’s open protectionism, his contempt for the European Union and his ambivalence toward NATO are serious and damaging, which Mr. Tusk understands, said Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Trump is the first American president since the E.U. was created not to be in favor of deeper European integration,” Mr. Leonard said. “Not only that, but he’s against it and sees the destruction of the European Union as in America’s interest.”

Worse, he said: “Europeans see Trump as the biggest threat to global order and the European ideal of how the world should be organized. The U.S. has been a crucial part of the ballast meant to be upholding the global order in the face of these other challenges Tusk mentions, from Russia and China to Islamic radicalism.”

“But rather than acting as a check on these forces, Trump seems to be amplifying them, and that’s pretty terrifying,” Mr. Leonard continued. “It’s like you suddenly discover that the medicine you’ve been taking is making you sicker than the illness itself.”

For his part, Mr. Trump described his confrontational diplomatic style as a necessity. “The world is in trouble, but we’re going to straighten it out, O.K.?” he said at the prayer breakfast on Thursday. “That’s what I do — I fix things.”

He added: “Believe me, when you hear about the tough phone calls I’m having, don’t worry about it. Just don’t worry about it.”

There have been other moments when Europeans judged American policies as harmful, including the Iraq war and the assaults on multilateralism early in the first term of President George W. Bush. “But Trump’s attacks are of a different scale and come when there’s a lot of indigenous turmoil anyway,” Mr. Leonard said. “He seems to be linking up with some of the scariest and darkest forces within European societies,” which all want the European Union to fail, he said.

Mr. Trump’s views about Europe and his reluctance to commit to summit meetings with the European Union or even with NATO are deeply troubling for Europeans, said Leslie Vinjamuri, a professor of international relations at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

“America’s strategy towards Europe has always been highly consequential, but up until now that strategy has been aimed at bolstering Europe,” she said. The United States has provided “that overarching protection and alliance that underpins the whole thing and makes it work,” she said. “But dealing with Russia and China is suddenly a whole different calculus if you don’t have America behind you.”

Then there is Germany and the euro. Traditionally, Europeans view Germany as the bulwark of the European Union, its largest, richest and most influential country, but uncomfortable with open leadership. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, up for re-election this autumn, is viewed as practical, pragmatic and devoted to the European project, and Germans see the euro as a political sacrifice they made of the revered deutsche mark to please the French.

So they deeply resent Mr. Trump’s attacks on Ms. Merkel for her refugee policy and his statements that the European Union itself is a “vehicle” for German self-interest. Ms. Merkel was angry over comments by Peter Navarro, the director of Mr. Trump’s new National Trade Council, that Germany was manipulating a “grossly undervalued” euro to gain trade advantages over other Europeans and the United States.

While Germany depends heavily on exports, annoying some of its neighbors, the value of the euro is the same for all that use it, and Ms. Merkel made clear that its value was up to the European Central Bank, not Berlin. But a protectionist America that opposes free trade is certainly unhelpful to Germany.

Added to that are the comments by Ted Malloch, who has been advertising himself as Mr. Trump’s top choice to succeed Anthony L. Gardner as ambassador to the European Union. Mr. Malloch, a strong supporter of Britain leaving the bloc, has publicly said that Mr. Trump “doesn’t like an organization that is supranational, that is unelected, where the bureaucrats run amok, and is not frankly a proper democracy.”

Mr. Malloch has also referred to Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, as “a very adequate mayor of some city in Luxembourg,” predicted that the euro would collapse and compared the bloc to the Soviet Union. “I had in a previous career a diplomatic post where I helped bring down the Soviet Union,” he said on British television. “So maybe there’s another union that needs a little taming.”

Mr. Malloch may not get nominated, and if he does, the bloc may not accept his posting, Mr. Gardner said.

Mr. Trump is “getting advice that is a caricature of the E.U. as a dysfunctional entity, not delivering and wholly inaccurate, despite all the challenges,” Mr. Gardner said, citing joint European-American efforts in counterterrorism, trade, sanctions, security, digital privacy and policing. “Even Mrs. May has said Britain sees a cohesive E.U. in British interests. She doesn’t want to see a disintegrating E.U. on its doorstep and nor do we. Hopefully that will be heard by others in the administration.”

Mr. Tusk, he said, has a point, trying to dissuade other European Union nations, like Hungary and Poland, from rushing to Washington to try to make separate deals, which would be illegal, with the Trump administration. China and Russia, too, have always tried to ignore the European Union and deal bilaterally with member states, something Mr. Trump seems to be encouraging.

The French, who are being tough on a British withdrawal and are deeply disconcerted by Mr. Trump, see him as a bigger threat to European cohesion, said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. “They see the three great world powers — Russia, China and now the U.S. — wanting to destroy the E.U.,” he said.

One impact of Mr. Trump that Mr. Tusk is clearly hoping for, Mr. Grant said, is “to reinforce a feeling of solidarity among mainstream European politicians.”

Another result, said François Heisbourg, a senior adviser with the French Foundation for Strategic Research, may be a more serious European effort at forming its own defense capacity, which may not be in the interests of NATO or the United States.

The American commitment to NATO and the European Union has been unconditional since their creation, Mr. Heisbourg said. “But Trump sees alliances as transactional, and once you state that, countries like Poland, Hungary and Japan start to hedge their bets.”

But Mr. Heisbourg also notes the impact of Mr. Trump’s dark view of the world as a helpless America being taken to the cleaners by its allies. “In the Trump world there are no sunny uplands, just darkness and hatred,” he said. “And in a continent that has had its share of hatred, this resonates.”

fonte: NYT

The Jacksonian Revolt

American Populism and the Liberal Order

Foreign Affairs

Walter Russell Mead

20 jan 2017

For the first time in 70 years, the American people have elected a president who disparages the policies, ideas, and institutions at the heart of postwar U.S. foreign policy. No one knows how the foreign policy of the Trump administration will take shape, or how the new president’s priorities and preferences will shift as he encounters the torrent of events and crises ahead. But not since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration has U.S. foreign policy witnessed debates this fundamental. 

Since World War II, U.S. grand strategy has been shaped by two major schools of thought, both focused on achieving a stable international system with the United States at the center. 

Hamiltonians believed that it was in the American interest for the United States to replace the United Kingdom as “the gyroscope of world order,” in the words of President Woodrow Wilson’s adviser Edward House during World War I, putting the financial and security architecture in place for a reviving global economy after World War II—something that would both contain the Soviet Union and advance U.S. interests. 

When the Soviet Union fell, Hamiltonians responded by doubling down on the creation of a global liberal order, understood primarily in economic terms. 

Wilsonians, meanwhile, also believed that the creation of a global liberal order was a vital U.S. interest, but they conceived of it in terms of values rather than economics. Seeing corrupt and authoritarian regimes abroad as a leading cause of conflict and violence, Wilsonians sought peace through the promotion of human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law. 

In the later stages of the Cold War, one branch of this camp, liberal institutionalists, focused on the promotion of international institutions and ever-closer global integration, while another branch, neoconservatives, believed that a liberal agenda could best be advanced through Washington’s unilateral efforts (or in voluntary conjunction with like-minded partners).

The disputes between and among these factions were intense and consequential, but they took place within a common commitment to a common project of global order. As that project came under increasing strain in recent decades, however, the unquestioned grip of the globalists on U.S. foreign policy thinking began to loosen. More nationalist, less globally minded voices began to be heard, and a public increasingly disenchanted with what it saw as the costly failures the global order-building project began to challenge what the foreign policy establishment was preaching. 

The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian schools of thought, prominent before World War II but out of favor during the heyday of the liberal order, have come back with a vengeance. 

Jeffersonians, including today’s so-called realists, argue that reducing the United States’ global profile would reduce the costs and risks of foreign policy. They seek to define U.S. interests narrowly and advance them in the safest and most economical ways. Libertarians take this proposition to its limits and find allies among many on the left who oppose interventionism, want to cut military spending, and favor redeploying the government’s efforts and resources at home. 

Both Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seemed to think that they could surf the rising tide of Jeffersonian thinking during the Republican presidential primary. 

But Donald Trump sensed something that his political rivals failed to grasp: that the truly surging force in American politics wasn’t Jeffersonian minimalism. It was Jacksonian populist nationalism.

IDENTITY POLITICS BITE BACK

The distinctively American populism Trump espouses is rooted in the thought and culture of the country’s first populist president, Andrew Jackson. 

For Jacksonians—who formed the core of Trump’s passionately supportive base—the

United States is not a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in the Enlightenment and oriented toward the fulfillment of a universal mission. 

Rather, it is the nation-state of the American people, and its chief business lies at home. 

Jacksonians see American exceptionalism not as a function of the universal appeal of American ideas, or even as a function of a unique American vocation to transform the world, but rather as rooted in the country’s singular commitment to the equality and dignity of individual American citizens. 

The role of the U.S. government, Jacksonians believe, is to fulfill the country’s destiny by looking after the physical security and economic well-being of the American people in their national home—and to do that while interfering as little as possible with the individual freedom that makes the country unique. 

Jacksonian populism is only intermittently concerned with foreign policy, and indeed it is only intermittently engaged with politics more generally. It took a particular combination of forces and trends to mobilize it this election cycle, and most of those were domestically focused. 

In seeking to explain the Jacksonian surge, commentators have looked to factors such as wage stagnation, the loss of good jobs for unskilled workers, the hollowing out of civic life, a rise in drug use—conditions many associate with life in blighted inner cities that have spread across much of the country. 

But this is a partial and incomplete view. 

Identity and culture have historically played a major role in American politics, and 2016 was no exception. 

Jacksonian America felt itself to be under siege, with its values under attack and its future under threat. Trump—flawed as many Jacksonians themselves believed him to be—seemed the only candidate willing to help fight for its survival.

For Jacksonian America, certain events galvanize intense interest and political engagement, however brief. One of these is war; when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians spring to the country’s defense. The most powerful driver of Jacksonian political engagement in domestic politics, similarly, is the perception that Jacksonians are being attacked by internal enemies, such as an elite cabal or immigrants from different backgrounds. 

Jacksonians worry about the U.S. government being taken over by malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character. 

They are not obsessed with corruption, seeing it as an ineradicable part of politics. But they care deeply about what they see as perversion—when politicians try to use the government to oppress the people rather than protect them. 

And that is what many Jacksonians came to feel was happening in recent years, with powerful forces in the American elite, including the political establishments of both major parties, in cahoots against them.

Many Jacksonians came to believe that the American establishment was no longer reliably patriotic, with “patriotism” defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America. And they were not wholly wrong, by their lights. Many Americans with cosmopolitan sympathies see their main ethical imperative as working for the betterment of humanity in general. 

Jacksonians locate their moral community closer to home, in fellow citizens who share a common national bond. If the cosmopolitans see Jacksonians as backward and chauvinistic, Jacksonians return the favor by seeing the cosmopolitan elite as near treasonous—people who think it is morally questionable to put their own country, and its citizens, first.

Jacksonian distrust of elite patriotism has been increased by the country’s selective embrace of identity politics in recent decades. The contemporary American scene is filled with civic, political, and academic movements celebrating various ethnic, racial, gender, and religious identities. Elites have gradually welcomed demands for cultural recognition by African Americans, Hispanics, women, the LGBTQ community, Native Americans, Muslim Americans. 

Yet the situation is more complex for most Jacksonians, who don’t see themselves as fitting neatly into any of those categories.

Whites who organize around their specific European ethnic roots can do so with little pushback; Italian Americans and Irish Americans, for example, have long and storied traditions in the parade of American identity groups. 

But increasingly, those older ethnic identities have faded, and there are taboos against claiming a generic European American or white identity. 

Many white Americans thus find themselves in a society that talks constantly about the importance of identity, that values ethnic authenticity, that offers economic benefits and social advantages based on identity—for everybody but them. 

For Americans of mixed European background or for the millions who think of themselves simply as American, there are few acceptable ways to celebrate or even connect with one’s heritage.

There are many reasons for this, rooted in a complex process of intellectual reflection over U.S. history, but the reasons don’t necessarily make intuitive sense to unemployed former factory workers and their families. 

The growing resistance among many white voters to what they call “political correctness” and a growing willingness to articulate their own sense of group identity can sometimes reflect racism, but they need not always do so. 

People constantly told that they are racist for thinking in positive terms about what they see as their identity, however, may decide that racist is what they are, and that they might as well make the best of it. 

The rise of the so-called alt-right is at least partly rooted in this dynamic. 

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the scattered, sometimes violent expressions of anti-police sentiment displayed in recent years compounded the Jacksonians’ sense of cultural alienation, and again, not simply because of race. 

Jacksonians instinctively support the police, just as they instinctively support the military. Those on the frontlines protecting society sometimes make mistakes, in this view, but mistakes are inevitable in the heat of combat, or in the face of crime. 

It is unfair and even immoral, many Jacksonians believe, to ask soldiers or police officers to put their lives on the line and face great risks and stress, only to have their choices second-guessed by armchair critics. Protests that many Americans saw as a quest for justice, therefore, often struck Jacksonians as attacks on law enforcement and public order. 

Gun control and immigration were two other issues that crystallized the perception among many voters that the political establishments of both parties had grown hostile to core national values. 

Non-Jacksonians often find it difficult to grasp the depth of the feelings these issues stir up and how proposals for gun control and immigration reform reinforce suspicions about elite control and cosmopolitanism. 

The right to bear arms plays a unique and hallowed role in Jacksonian political culture, and many Jacksonians consider the Second Amendment to be the most important in the Constitution. 

These Americans see the right of revolution, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, as the last resort of a free people to defend themselves against tyranny—and see that right as unenforceable without the possibility of bearing arms. 

They regard a family’s right to protect itself without reliance on the state, meanwhile, as not just a hypothetical ideal but a potential practical necessity—and something that elites don’t care about or even actively oppose. (Jacksonians have become increasingly concerned that Democrats and centrist Republicans will try to disarm them, which is one reason why mass shootings and subsequent calls for gun control spur spikes in gun sales, even as crime more generally has fallen.)

As for immigration, here, too, most non-Jacksonians misread the source and nature of Jacksonian concern. 

There has been much discussion about the impact of immigration on the wages of low-skilled workers and some talk about xenophobia and Islamophobia. 

But Jacksonians in 2016 saw immigration as part of a deliberate and conscious attempt to marginalize them in their own country. 

Hopeful talk among Democrats about an “emerging Democratic majority” based on a secular decline in the percentage of the voting population that is white was heard in Jacksonian America as support for a deliberate transformation of American demographics. 

When Jacksonians hear elites’ strong support for high levels of immigration and their seeming lack of concern about illegal immigration, they do not immediately think of their pocketbooks. They see an elite out to banish them from power—politically, culturally, demographically. 

The recent spate of dramatic random terrorist attacks, finally, fused the immigration and personal security issues into a single toxic whole.

In short, in November, many Americans voted their lack of confidence—not in a particular party but in the governing classes more generally and their associated global cosmopolitan ideology. 

Many Trump voters were less concerned with pushing a specific program than with stopping what appeared to be the inexorable movement of their country toward catastrophe.

THE ROAD AHEAD

What all of this means for U.S. foreign policy remains to be seen. Many previous presidents have had to revise their ideas substantially after reaching the Oval Office; Trump may be no exception. 

Nor is it clear just what the results would be of trying to put his unorthodox policies into practice. (Jacksonians can become disappointed with failure and turn away from even former heroes they once embraced; this happened to President George W. Bush, and it could happen to Trump, too.) 

At the moment, Jacksonians are skeptical about the United States’ policy of global engagement and liberal order building—but more from a lack of trust in the people shaping foreign policy than from a desire for a specific alternative vision. 

They oppose recent trade agreements not because they understand the details and consequences of those extremely complex agreements’ terms but because they have come to believe that the negotiators of those agreements did not necessarily have the United States’ interests at heart. Most Jacksonians are not foreign policy experts and do not ever expect to become experts. 

For them, leadership is necessarily a matter of trust. If they believe in a leader or a political movement, they are prepared to accept policies that seem counter-intuitive and difficult. 

They no longer have such trust in the American establishment, and unless and until it can be restored, they will keep Washington on a short leash. To paraphrase what the neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol wrote about Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1952, there is one thing that Jacksonians know about Trump—that he is unequivocally on their side. 

About their country’s elites, they feel they know no such thing. And their concerns are not all illegitimate, for the United States’ global order-building project is hardly flourishing.

Over the past quarter century, Western policymakers became infatuated with some dangerously oversimplified ideas. They believed capitalism had been tamed and would no longer generate economic, social, or political upheavals. 

They felt that illiberal ideologies and political emotions had been left in the historical dustbin and were believed only by “bitter” losers—people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations,” as Barack Obama famously put it in 2008. 

Time and the normal processes of history would solve the problem; constructing a liberal world order was simply a matter of working out the details. Given such views, many recent developments—from the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism to the financial crisis to the recent surge of angry nationalist populism on both sides of the Atlantic—came as a rude surprise. 

It is increasingly clear that globalization and automation have helped break up the socioeconomic model that undergirded postwar prosperity and domestic social peace, and that the next stage of capitalist development will challenge the very foundations of both the global liberal order and many of its national pillars.

In this new world disorder, the power of identity politics can no longer be denied. Western elites believed that in the twenty-first century, cosmopolitanism and globalism would triumph over atavism and tribal loyalties. 

They failed to understand the deep roots of identity politics in the human psyche and the necessity for those roots to find political expression in both foreign and domestic policy arenas. And they failed to understand that the very forces of economic and social development that cosmopolitanism and globalization fostered would generate turbulence and eventually resistance, as Gemeinschaft (community) fought back against the onrushing Gesellschaft (market society), in the classic terms sociologists favored a century ago.

The challenge for international politics in the days ahead is therefore less to complete the task of liberal world order building along conventional lines than to find a way to stop the liberal order’s erosion and reground the global system on a more sustainable basis. 

International order needs to rest not just on elite consensus and balances of power and policy but also on the free choices of national communities—communities that need to feel protected from the outside world as much as they want to benefit from engaging with it.

fonte: Foreign Affairs

EUA expulsam diplomatas russos

Deutsch Welle
29 dez 2016

Obama anuncia série de medidas em resposta à suposta interferência russa na eleição presidencial americana, incluindo sanções, expulsão de diplomatas e fechamento de instalações usadas para inteligência.

Os Estados Unidos determinaram nesta quinta-feira (29/12) a expulsão do país de 35 diplomatas, fecharam dois complexos em Nova York e Maryland e anunciaram sanções a nove entidades ou pessoas da Rússia, incluindo serviços secretos, em resposta a uma alegada interferência nas eleições presidenciais de novembro.

"Ordenei uma série de ações em resposta ao assédio agressivo do governo russo a funcionários dos EUA e a operações cibernéticas que visaram as eleições dos Estados Unidos", disse o presidente Barack Obama. 

"Essas ações seguem as repetidas advertências – privadas e públicas – que emitimos ao governo russo e são uma resposta necessária e apropriada aos esforços feitos para prejudicar os interesses dos EUA, violando normas internacionais de comportamento", prosseguiu.

Entre as medidas anunciadas estão sanções às agências de inteligência russas FSB (Serviço Federal de Segurança) e GRU, a expulsão de 35 diplomatas da embaixada russa em Washington e do consulado de San Francisco e o fechamento de dois complexos em Nova York e Maryland, usados "para fins relacionados à inteligência".

Os diplomatas russos foram classificados como persona non grata por terem agido de "forma inconsistente com seu status diplomático", ou seja, agirem como oficiais de inteligência. Eles e suas famílias têm 72 horas para deixar os EUA. O acesso aos dois complexos será negado a todos os oficiais russos a partir do meio-dia desta sexta-feira.

Os sancionados são as agências FSB e GRU, quatro chefes da GRU e três empresas ou organizações acusadas de apoiar operações de invasão de computadores. Como integrantes da GRU raramente viajam aos Estados Unidos ou têm bens no país, as sanções contra eles têm sobretudo caráter simbólico.

"Essas ações não são a soma total de nossa resposta às atividades agressivas da Rússia. Continuaremos tomando uma variedade de medidas num momento e local de nossa escolha, e algumas destas não serão divulgadas", explicou Obama. "Todos os americanos devem ficar alarmados com as ações da Rússia."

O porta-voz da Câmara dos Deputados dos EUA, Paul Ryan, afirmou que a Rússia tentou "minar consistentemente" os interesses dos EUA e que as sanções impostas pelo governo de Obama vieram tarde demais. 

"Embora a ação de hoje esteja atrasada, é uma maneira apropriada de encerrar oito anos de política fracassada com a Rússia", afirmou. "E serve como exemplo da ineficácia deste governo na política externa, que deixou os EUA mais fracos aos olhos do mundo."

O ministro das Relações Exteriores da Rússia, Konstantin Dolgov, afirmou que as sanções americanas são contraprodutivas e prejudicarão a restauração dos laços bilaterais, reportou a agência russa de notícias Interfax. O governo russo nega estar por trás de uma suposta interferência de hackers nas eleições americanas.

O governo russo disse que as sanções impostas pelos Estados Unidos são infundadas e rejeita as alegações de interferência nas eleições presidenciais americanas. 

"Como já dissemos antes, acreditamos que tais decisões, tais sanções sejam infundadas e ilegais do ponto de vista do direito internacional", disse o porta-voz do Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov. "Rejeitamos alegações e acusações infundadas contra a Rússia".

fonte: DW Brasil

Trump: Is This the End of US Soft Power in Asia?

Donald Trump’s election will likely lead to an unprecedented decline in U.S. soft power in the region and the world.

The Diplomat

By Oliver Stuenkel

November 16, 2016

Since Donald Trump’s stunning election victory on November 8, much has been written about the possible implications for U.S. foreign policy and how it could affect the world. In addition to debates in Europe, speculation has been particularly heated in Asia, as the president-elect’s ambiguity about whether the United States will maintain its security commitments to Japan and South Korea has potentially profound implications for both regional and global order.

Yet since key appointments still have to be made, it is too early to make region-specific predictions. Indeed, given how little Trump knows about foreign policy, and how much he may have to depend on insiders, it is possible that we will see much more continuity than change.

One remarkable development, however, is already becoming apparent: a bruising election campaign and the victory of Donald Trump is likely to lead to an unprecedented decline in U.S. soft power.

In addition to weakening the social fabric of U.S. society and verbally attacking any non-white minorities, boasting about sexual assault against women, mocking disabled people, and supporting torture, Trump’s decision to criticize the judiciary, threaten to prosecute journalists, and allude to voter fraud significantly undermined democratic culture in the United States and its attractiveness in the world. The nomination of a white supremacist as chief strategist at the White House and Twitter attacks against the New York Timessuggest that Trump’s rhetoric is unlikely to change much after the election.

The rise of “post-truth” and identity politics will weaken the West’s key advantage vis-à-vis a rising China: its noisy but ultimately moderate and stability-producing democracy, its embrace of diversity and globalization, and its capacity to integrate migrants from all over the world. These are some of the key ingredients of U.S. soft power abroad.

Irrespective of actual policy changes, President Trump symbolizes the end of an era in which the United States projected itself as a model democracy and built most of its foreign policy rhetoric around the notion that other countries should look toward it not only for protection and economic cooperation, but, perhaps even more importantly, for inspiration and guidance.

U.S. soft power always functioned as a key pillar of that strategy and consistently sought to claim the moral high ground, even in moments when ill-conceived military adventures temporarily led to anti-U.S. sentiment around the world. The United States served as the bastion of the liberal internationalist camp and tried to weaken (at least in rhetoric) voices of populism, nationalism, and xenophobia – whether in Russia, Venezuela, China, or, most recently, in the United Kingdom before Brexit. President-elect Trump, by comparison, chose to receive Brexit advocate Nigel Farage as the first foreign politician after his upset victory.

In Asia, a President Trump may inadvertently help strengthen a notion often repeated in China and across Central Asia that democracies produce more unpredictability than authoritarian regimes. The longer such a scenario prevails, the more difficult it will be to convince other countries that defending democratic governance around the world is both morally and strategically advantageous. In the same way, the stronger anti-Muslim currents become in Western democracies, the harder it will be to claim the moral high ground and criticize governments in China, Myanmar, and elsewhere for the way they treat their religious minorities.

Naturally, soft power is about more than just governments, and U.S. culture per se will remain more attractive to most young Asians. In the Philippines, South Korea, and Vietnam, majorities are still likely to view the United States more favorably than China. And yet, deportations of illegal immigrants and a closing of borders will undermine the way the world views the United States. At the same time, China, eager to enhance its influence in the region through a series of initiatives such as OBOR, the AIIB and CICA (which can also be seen as attempts to promote soft power), will seek to project itself as the defender-in-chief of globalization at a time when the United States has become afraid, pessimistic and inward-looking – hence Trump’s decision to pull out of the TPP.

To policymakers in Japan, Seoul, and Hanoi, U.S. security guarantees will still be essential, as their worries about China’s rise remain unchanged. Indeed, U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Asia could be marked more by continuity than change. And yet, as the United States has succumbed, for now, to a nationalist demagogue who cares little about U.S. soft power, it will be worth monitoring public perceptions across Asia of the United States – which may invariably influence the way policymakers relate to Washington in the coming years.

Oliver Stuenkel is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo.

fonte: The Diplomat

Trump: The new nationalism

The Economist
Nov 19th 2016 

With his call to put “America First”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism

WHEN Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again!” he was echoing the campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Back then voters sought renewal after the failures of the Carter presidency. This month they elected Mr Trump because he, too, promised them a “historic once-in-a-lifetime” change.

But there is a difference. On the eve of the vote, Reagan described America as a shining “city on a hill”. Listing all that America could contribute to keep the world safe, he dreamed of a country that “is not turned inward, but outward—toward others”. Mr Trump, by contrast, has sworn to put America First. Demanding respect from a freeloading world that takes leaders in Washington for fools, he says he will “no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism”. Reagan’s America was optimistic: Mr Trump’s is angry.

Welcome to the new nationalism. For the first time since the second world war, the great and rising powers are simultaneously in thrall to various sorts of chauvinism. Like Mr Trump, leaders of countries such as Russia, China and Turkey embrace a pessimistic view that foreign affairs are often a zero-sum game in which global interests compete with national ones. It is a big change that makes for a more dangerous world.

My country right or left

Nationalism is a slippery concept, which is why politicians find it so easy to manipulate. At its best, it unites the country around common values to accomplish things that people could never manage alone. This “civic nationalism” is conciliatory and forward-looking—the nationalism of the Peace Corps, say, or Canada’s inclusive patriotism or German support for the home team as hosts of the 2006 World Cup. Civic nationalism appeals to universal values, such as freedom and equality. It contrasts with “ethnic nationalism”, which is zero-sum, aggressive and nostalgic and which draws on race or history to set the nation apart. In its darkest hour in the first half of the 20th century ethnic nationalism led to war.

Mr Trump’s populism is a blow to civic nationalism. Nobody could doubt the patriotism of his post-war predecessors, yet every one of them endorsed America’s universal values and promoted them abroad. Even if a sense of exceptionalism stopped presidents signing up to outfits like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), America has supported the rules-based order. By backing global institutions that staved off a dog-eat-dog world, the United States has made itself and the world safer and more prosperous.

Mr Trump threatens to weaken that commitment even as ethnic nationalism is strengthening elsewhere. In Russia Vladimir Putin has shunned cosmopolitan liberal values for a distinctly Russian mix of Slavic tradition and Orthodox Christianity. In Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan has turned away from the European Union and from peace talks with the Kurdish minority, in favour of a strident, Islamic nationalism that is quick to detect insults and threats from abroad. In India Narendra Modi remains outward-looking and modernising, but he has ties to radical ethnic-nationalist Hindu groups that preach chauvinism and intolerance.

Meanwhile, Chinese nationalism has become so angry and vengeful that the party struggles to control it. True, the country depends upon open markets, embraces some global institutions and wants to be close to America.  But from the 1990s onwards schoolchildren have received a daily dose of “patriotic” education setting out the mission to erase a century of humiliating occupation. And, to count as properly Chinese you have in practice to belong to the Han people: everyone else is a second-class citizen.

Even as ethnic nationalism has prospered, the world’s greatest experiment in “post-nationalism” has foundered. The architects of what was to become the EU believed that nationalism, which had dragged Europe into two ruinous world wars, would wither and die. The EU would transcend national rivalries with a series of nested identities in which you could be Catholic, Alsatian, French and European all at once.

However, in large parts of the EU this never happened. The British have voted to leave and in former communist countries, such as Poland and Hungary, power has passed to xenophobic ultranationalists. There is even a small but growing threat that France might quit—and so destroy—the EU.

The last time America turned inward was after the first world war and the consequences were calamitous. You do not have to foresee anything so dire to fear Mr Trump’s new nationalism today. At home it tends to produce intolerance and to feed doubts about the virtue and loyalties of minorities. It is no accident that allegations of anti-Semitism have infected the bloodstream of American politics for the first time in decades.

Abroad, as other countries take their cue from a more inward-looking United States, regional and global problems will become harder to solve. The ICC’s annual assembly this week was overshadowed by the departure of three African countries. China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea are incompatible with UNCLOS. If Mr Trump enacts even a fraction of his mercantilist rhetoric, he risks neutering the World Trade Organisation. If he thinks that America’s allies are failing to pay for the security they receive, he has threatened to walk away from them. The result—especially for small countries that today are protected by global rules—will be a harsher and more unstable world.

Isolationists unite

Mr Trump needs to realise that his policies will unfold in the context of other countries’ jealous nationalism. Disengaging will not cut America off from the world so much as leave it vulnerable to the turmoil and strife that the new nationalism engenders. As global politics is poisoned, America will be impoverished and its own anger will grow, which risks trapping Mr Trump in a vicious circle of reprisals and hostility. It is not too late for him to abandon his dark vision. For the sake of his country and the world he urgently needs to reclaim the enlightened patriotism of the presidents who went before him.

fonte: The Economist

Trump: o fim do mundo como conhecemos

Marcos Troyjo

Eleição de Trump representa 'fim do mundo como o conhecemos'

09/11/2016  06h20

Durante a corrida à Casa Branca, escancararam-se grandes diferenças no estilo de política externa dos EUA defendido pelos candidatos Hillary Clinton ou Donald Trump.

No limite, tais distinções remetem a dilema que frequenta a visão de mundo e a atuação externa dos EUA há pelo menos cem anos. Em grande parte de sua história, os EUA tiveram de optar por isolamento ou presença global.

No primeiro caso, amplamente observado no século 19, os norte-americanos forjaram sua política externa na compreensão de que seus vizinhos eram geopoliticamente fracos e de que a Europa era fonte dos males do mundo.

Cabia portanto fazer do Atlântico um "lago americano", com forte poderio naval. Quanto a intervenções para além das Américas, como foi a Primeira Guerra Mundial, os EUA poderiam atuar para ajudar a restabeler equilíbrios geopolíticos regionais, mas não "ficar no mundo".
Foi justamente essa necessidade de permanecer nos palcos globais —como precondição da ideia de Ocidente depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial— a que Churchill convida os EUA em seu famoso pronunciamento no Westminster College, no Missouri há setenta anos. Esta foi a tônica do famoso discurso da "Cortina de Ferro".

Nesta campanha presidencial, Hillary defendeu a permanência do engajamento global dos EUA em termos econômicos e militares. Se vencesse as eleições, ela continuaria a defender o "pivô para a Ásia" da política externa, iniciado na presidência Obama, e que rompeu com uma tradição de 200 anos de priorização dos temas atlânticos.

Como presidente, Hillary traria consigo a experiência de haver chefiado o Departamento de Estado e portanto fluência nas minúcias da diplomacia.

A propósito, Hillary teria como companheiros na lista de presidentes que também foram Secretários de Estado nomes como Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren e James Buchanan (este um dos piores presidentes, segundo muitos analistas, por não haver evitado a Guerra Civil). Os EUA portanto não veem um presidente que anteriormente tenha exercido o cargo de secretário de Estado desde em 1857, quando Buchanan começou seu mandato.

Hillary manteria a estratégia de combate ao Estado Islâmico (EI) e à Al Qaeda sem o comprometimento de tropas americanas. Privilegiaria, assim, a utilização ampliada de tecnologia (com drones de ataque, por exemplo) e apoio logístico e de inteligência a forças locais, como na atual ofensiva das forças iraquianas contra o EI em Mossul.

A candidata democrata também se oporia a uma expansão do poderio militar chinês e suas ambições territoriais, sobretudo marítimas, bem como ao regime de Putin na Rússia.

Se vencesse, com Hillary haveria ao menos a possibilidade de reedição de uma nova iniciativa para as Américas. Foi o que ela sinalizou no discurso reservado que pronunciou numa reunião corporativa do Banco Itaú em 2013 —e que vazou pela imprensa via WikiLeaks. Talvez ali estava a verdadeira Hillary— e não a personagem protecionista que ela encenou durante a campanha.

Já Trump representa um fator "desglobalizante" para a política externa dos EUA. Washington provavelmente se afastará de muitos dos pilares que sustentam a visão de mundo dos EUA há décadas. Aumentam os embaraços com OTAN, Banco Mundial, FMI e as demais chamadas "instituições de Washington". Trump, se seguir a linha que indicou durante a campanha, denunciará o Nafta e rasgará o TTP, além de incitar a uma guerra comercial contra atuais parceiros como México ou China.

Outro fator notável será a abertura a uma maior cooperação com a Rússia de Putin, com quem Trump já trocou elogios públicos. Trata-se de uma enorme mudança em relação ao candidato republicano anterior – Mitt Romney – que durante a campanha de 2012 identificou no Kremlin o principal antagonista geopolítico dos interesses de Washington.

Trump se vale de parte da insatisfação econômica interna, como o sentimento de perda de postos de trabalho que a mão de obra industrial menos qualificada experimenta nos EUA, para disseminar soluções simplistas de política externa baseadas em preconceitos ou diagnósticos equivocados.

Deste bizarro acervo fazem parte proposições como banir a entrada de muçulmanos nos EUA, construir um muro na fronteira com o México, ou impôr um tarifa unilateral de comércio sobre exportações chinesas aos EUA no patamar de 40%.

Em relação à Ásia, com Trump os EUA tendem a retrair sua presença na região. Tal hipótese é ótima para a China, que gosta de se ver como geopoliticamente preponderante na Ásia, e ainda guarda grandes ressentimentos do Japão e sua belicosidade antes e durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Com tal retração, aumenta consideravelmente o peso relativo da capacidade de dissuasão chinesa, e portanto diminui o leque de opções para potências intermediárias como Malásia, Filipinas e Taiwan, embora seja difícil pensar nesta última alinhando-se a Pequim, salvo no caso de incorporação de Taipei ao regime da China continental.

Já no que toca à Europa, Trump se identifica com movimentos nativistas ou isolacionistas.

Assim foi com as forças que trabalharam em prol do "brexit" e pode-se dizer o mesmo em relação a esses grupamentos políticos que disputarão eleições na França e na Alemanha em 2017.

Os EUA sempre viram a existência da União Europeia e a Otan como algo central para seus interesses de estabilidade e segurança no Velho Continente. Isso continuaria com Hillary, que também buscaria avançar no TTIP —a Parceria Transatlântica de Comércio e
Investimentos. Já com Trump, tanto o Tratado do Atlântico Norte como a burocracia de Bruxelas perdem relevância. Navegamos em águas desconhecidas.

Pouco deve-se esperar da Casa Branca em termos de América Latina. A região não é prioridade para Trump. O México tem maior relevância seja em função do Nafta ou da questão imigratória.

Tudo isso, no entanto, dependenderá de quanto da tresloucada retórica da campanha ele carregará consigo para a Casa Branca. O mais correto é dizer que Trump não tem um plano de política externa, apenas um conjunto de posições superficiais.

Numa canção de 1987 da banda de rock R.E.M ouvia-se "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)".

A eleição de Trump certamente representa a sensação de "fim do mundo como o conhecemos", mas com ela, ao redor do globo, poucos se sentem bem. 

Marcos Troyjo é economista, diplomata e cientista social. Dirige o BRICLAB da Universidade Columbia em NYonde é professor-adjunto de relações internacionas e políticas públicas. 

fonte: Folha SP